May 2015

This week’s post comes to us from Katie Gilligan, VP of Texthelp’s Professional Solutions division. She attended the SIIA ETIN Education Industry Summit earlier this month, and has put together a recap of some of the highlights of this event.

Educational technology removes barriers to access and improves learning for a growing population of ‘next gen’ learners. Students today are native tech users, and we all strive to understand the rapid changes in how technology is used in education.

The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) is an organization that helps connect the education industry and guides investment in new software and digital content.

SIIA’s Education Technology Industry Network (ETIN) 2015 Education Industry Summit (EIS) wrapped up on May 5th, with over 300 senior education publishing executives in attendance. The summit offered a range of sessions designed to improve the quality and effectiveness of online learning programs.

For those who aren’t familiar, Snapverter™ is a Texthelp tool that makes it easy for teachers to turn their paper worksheets and inaccessible files into accessible classroom content.

Snapverter takes files like images, inaccessible PDFs and Daisy books and converts them to accessible PDFs and ePubs. The app integrates with Google Drive, so converted materials can be easily shared with students and colleagues.

One of the most popular (and creative) ways that we’ve seen Snapverter used is on a smartphone or other mobile device. You can snap a quick photo of a document or worksheet and use Snapverter to convert it into a PDF – turning your smartphone into an OCR scanner!

This week kicks off Teacher Appreciation Week in the U.S., which is the designated time of year to say thanks for all of the hard work that educators put into helping today’s youth prepare for a successful future. While we should all appreciate teachers every day, Texthelp is joining in this week’s activities by offering a chance to win a Chromebook each day, and renewing every educator’s free subscription to the premium version of Read&Write for Google Chrome™.